Mike Qaissaunee, a Professor of Engineering and Technology at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, New Jersey, shares his experiences and perspectives on integrating new technologies in and approaches to teaching and learning. ~ Subscribe to this Blog

Friday, July 27, 2007

Did you Jing today?

Jing, available for free at www.jingproject.com, is a new product from TechSmith Corporation launched on Tuesday July 17th. You're probably familiar with TechSmith's other products, Camtasia Studio and SnagIt. Briefly, Jing gives you the screen capture capability of SnagIt, combined with the screencasting of Camtasia, but with a very different approach. Jing - available for Windows XP and Vista and Mac OS X - runs in the background ready to capture and share anything you're doing - a little unobtrusive "sun" as seen here on my Macbook. Jing is a small, sleek little application - not intended to give you the full feature set of either SnagIt or Camtasia. Instead, Jing is about quickly capturing information and sharing it. Images are saved only as .png files (lossless) and videos [limited to 5 minutes] as .swf (flash - present on almost every computer in the world). Jing doesn't require or allow you to do any editing, clean up or production. If you need full-blown editing and production capabilities, you can use SnagIt and Camtasia; Jing is quick and easy no frills screencasting. If you've got something you'd like to share, mouse over the "sun" to see three "sunbursts" - capture, history and more. If you click on capture, you get a pair of crosshairs that you can use to select a region to record. In a corner of the region you'll see controls that allow you to capture images or video.Once you've finished capturing/recording, Jing allows you to preview your recording and either share it, save it or cancel the recording. As you would expect, saving just saves either a .png or .swf file on your local hard drive. Sharing though is something altogether different! When you first use Jing it takes you to screencast.com - TechSmith's hosting service - and has you create a free account. When you click share, your content is automatically uploaded to this hosting service, Jing generates a url and puts it in your clipboard. You can share the video with anyone, by emailing, iming or otherwise sending them the url. You can also grab the html code from screencast.com to embed the video in a blog or website.Imagine the potential uses for this! Students or colleagues ask a question - you record a 5-minute video that answers the question and share it with them immediately.

It's not clear if Jing will be free forever or if they will continue to give out screencast accounts, so try it out while you can. Here's a sample video showing another interesting product Joost - web-based or IPTV - which is by invitation only. Email me if you need a Joost invite!Jing Demo Keep in mind that this is a video of a video so you may lose some quality, but I encourage you to try out both Jing and Joost [invitation only] - they're really great products.